Columnist Aled Blake says there are solutions to the 'staggering' report into social mobility in Britain - but they're unlikely to be ever acted upon

If you’ve not been to the right kind of school, to the right kind of university, the jobs of power and influence won’t be yours.

That’s the brutal truth in a report we should all take time to read this week.

The findings of the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission study should hardly be a surprise.

You only have look at the government benches in Westminster to see the country is largely run by gangs of white, upper-middle class, privately-educated men.

The message is clear, to get ahead in Britain, you have to be a certain type.

Class still matters, despite what else we might have been told.

The top jobs don’t go to the top people, they go to the people who’ve been to the so-called top schools and in doing so, have got into the top universities.

Alan Milburn, the former Labour cabinet minister who chaired the commission, said these jobs remain “disproportionately held by people from a narrow range of background,” adding: “The institutions that matter appear to be a cosy club.”

Milburn’s report is staggering, if not surprising, in laying out exactly just how cosy this club of elites is.

More than seven in 10 (71%) of senior judges, 62% of senior armed forces officers, over half of permanent secretaries (55%) – the most senior civil servants in government – 53% of senior diplomats, 45% of public body chairs, 44% of the Sunday Times Rich List, 43% of newspaper columnists, 35% of national rugby teams, a third (33%) of the England cricket team and 26% of BBC executives attended a fee-paying school.

Half of the House of Lords attended an independent school along with more than a third (36%) of the Cabinet, a third (33%) of MPs, and 22% of the shadow cabinet.

Meanwhile, in the real world only 7% of the UK population attended a private school.

The report describes the situation as “social engineering”. It’s difficult to accept it as anything else.

Far from being a democracy run on meritocratic ideals, we are a country where the talents of a great swathe of the population are ignored and lost because their faces don’t fit.

Milburn sums up succinctly why this matters and why it’s so dangerous.

“It is entirely possible,” he says, “for politicians to rely on advisors to advise, civil servants to devise policy solutions and journalists to report on their actions having all studied the same courses at the same universities, having read the same books, heard the same lectures and even being taught by the same tutors.

“This risks narrowing the conduct of public life to a small few, who are very familiar with each other but far less familiar with the day-to-day challenges facing ordinary people in the country.”

There’s little in the report on what can be done to address this great societal scandal.

Milburn et al merely argue the grip on society by these elites can only be loosened slowly and by a national effort involving government, parents, schools, universities and employers.

There is probably a swifter and more effective way of dealing with it – a solution unlikely to be ever contemplated because the elites who run the country will never want it to happen... namely: we rid ourselves of the private school system.

These breeding grounds for elitism and snobbery, places where the chances of other clever, talented people are limited because of their very existence, are at the very heart of this social mobility crisis.

Wipe them out and we go a long way in wiping out the problem.

You could tax them out of existence, you could nationalise them, you could legislate against them. Whatever way you do it, the result would be the same: a fairer and more decent and more equal country would be built.

If we start valuing every child as an equal, instead of by how much money mummy and daddy has, then we can start creating a fair society which offers opportunities for everyone no matter their background, their family’s wealth, their sex or the colour of their skin.

And in doing so we as a country accept that funding such an education system – just like funding the health service we want, need and deserve – will cost us all extra money. I’d happily pay a few more pounds every month to the taxman in the knowledge that the money was being pumped into comprehensive state schools, wouldn’t you?

None of that is likely to happen, for this is a report that will be shelved to gather dust and to be referred to by outraged, fringey left-wingers.

As long as we accept that it’s OK for us to have a monarchy, an unelected second chamber, a system of learning based on wealth and not ability, then the upper-echelons of British life will continue to be populated by that certain type of person.

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